Misty Eyed City: KHL Players who died in plane crash honored at hockey game

The plane crash that killed nearly the entire Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team this week was a tragedy of unimaginable proportion, but the KHL and its players are doing their best to move on.

Lokomotiv was on its way to Belarus for a game against Dynamo Minsk when the plane crashed. With the game no longer possible and no longer important, Minsk spent that night instead honoring the lost players with a touching tribute on the ice.

“The ceremony was held in the packed arena,” reports RT.com (as found by Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog). “Each spectator brought flowers. All the Belarusian leadership, including president Aleksandr Lukashenko, were present at the event. Never was the arena that silent as 37 huge portraits of the players and staff were placed on the ice. A requiem mass was performed by an orchestra, while portraits of the departed Yaroslavl friends and icons appeared on the scoreboard.

“Each picture was met with a storm of applause, after which the Dynamo players scored a puck each in their own net.” NESN.com